Planting a House Church on the Back of a Napkin
In case you missed it, I’ve been attempting to put reproducible patterns on the back of a napkin. This is what I would give to someone who was asking for details about planting a house church.
The Back of a Napkin Series:
Love That is Utterly Despised
Many waters cannot quench love,
Nor can the floods drown it.
If a man would give for love
All the wealth of his house,
It would be utterly despised.
As I’ve been reading through the Song of Songs, I’ve been musing on the nature of love. But this verse caught my attention the other day and I’ve been thinking about it’s implications. Join me in thinking through what it means:
The first part of the verse is pretty easy. Love is powerful. It’s a fire that can’t be put out with water. Not even many waters can put out the fire of love–it’s that powerful.
But the second part is much more difficult. If a man gave all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly despised. This flies in the face of what we are taught about love, doesn’t it? Often we’re taught that love is a sacrifice, that it’s not just flowery emotions or lustful passions, but laying down our lives for one another in service. This verse seems contradictory to that idea.
Let me try and help. If a man sold all he had and attempted to buy the love of a woman, most of us would react strongly, somewhere between bored disgust and outright rage. We’d look at that man and know that he might have desire in his heart, but no real love. He was attempting to make a transaction.
Real love isn’t transactional. It’s not looking to give something in order to get something in return. It’s birthed out of a much deeper, more real place, where, yes we’re willing to give all we have, but it’s because we love whoever it is we’ve fallen in love with.
The best example is God’s love. God’s love is never transactional. We could never earn it. If we sold everything in our house and gave it to the church or the poor in order to make God love us, it would be utterly despised. We can’t buy God’s love. Nor should we want to. If we buy love, it’s not love, it’s just a transaction.
This is why it’s good news that God loved us first. The apostle John says this, “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins,” (1 John 4:10). See, we cannot buy our way into this love. We can’t earn it. There is no level of righteousness that will get God to love us more than He already has. We can only receive the love of God and live lives that are a response to it.
But this is true for more than just God. We are called to love others, but often, especially within the church, we feel the need to try and win others’ love through serving. In many ways, this is giving what we have for love. It’s trying to earn love from others through our efforts or even trying to win love for God through what we do.
Now we still need to love others, but we cannot buy love through service or sacrifice. Have you ever been served by someone who you felt like didn’t love you? It doesn’t feel good. It feels forced. No one wants to feel tolerated. It’s the noisy gong and clanging symbol that Paul warns us about.
What do we do when we find we don’t love someone from the heart? We go back to God and ask Him to fill our hearts with His true love for that person. This may seem hopeless because you can do very little, but when you are convinced that God loves you in all of your weakness and mess it’s so much easier to love others who are weak and broken.
Love is stronger than death. It cannot be put out. But the fake love that doesn’t come from God will not last. Give yourself to getting the kind of love that will stand the test of time and overcome death.
You won’t regret it.
Reason #4 We Started a House Church
[This is part of an ongoing, irregularly published series on the reasons we started a house church. Reasons #1-3 will be listed at the bottom of the post.]
Christianity has a dirty little secret: The people within the church often live with significant parts of their life hidden and unchanged.
Much of this is due to people within the church only knowing each other as participants in events. Our modern church experience, for the most part is busy, full of events to be a part of and then left. There is very little lingering afterwards to build relationships where we know each other and are able to help each other with our weaknesses.
Which is exactly part of the reason we started a house church. The Christianity described in the New Testament is a relationship with Christ and a relationship with the people who follow Him, not an event people came to. This is why most of the New Testament descriptions of the church are about how Christians should relate to one another, not how a meeting should work. I’m not against meeting together but the emphasis is not on the meeting.
In fact, when we started our first house church, we decided that we would have meetings, but they would support relationships. We would focus on Jesus and the people who were meeting together, not just singing the right amount of songs or having a certain type of teaching happen. This frees up time both inside and outside the meeting to love one another well, to hear the stories that inform so much of each others’ lives, and to be with one another in everyday situations where we can truly see how each other live.
Here’s a brief, made up example: We allow our children to participate in our house churches. This presents a tremendous challenge as a house church if kids are too loud or distracting in the meeting. But suppose a parent disciplined their child too harshly during a meeting or didn’t correct a child who was being too unruly. This would rarely be addressed, let alone seen, in a large event but would be open for everyone to see within a house church. If a brother or sister takes up the issue with the parent in question, other issues might come up, including how the Gospel applies to parenting, the parent’s past issues with their own parent’s discipline, or even issues in the parents’ marriage.
House churches have the time and space to love one another and walk through these issues together. They don’t have a specific agenda which needs to be followed. They exist for moments like these, where the issues of the life come to the surface. Will the issue be resolved within one meeting? No. But it will come to light there. It may get some resolution there. It will be walked out with the believers who are there over the days and weeks to come.
Relationships are some of the keys to both recognizing issues in peoples’ lives and helping them resolve those issues. House churches can’t stop people from hiding their lives, but they do allow us to live close enough to each other to recognize where Jesus is touching issues and to be part of the process of bring healing to them.
Which is why we started a house church….
Reason #1 We Started a House Church
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 